If I had engaged in activities that involved fleecing the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom of billions in public funds in the name of “climate research”, and it was found that I had manipulated the data to advance the “global warming” hoax, wouldn’t I be facing charges of fraud?

Or if the universities for which I worked had benefited from receiving those public funds had conducted hearings that exonerated me, wouldn’t those institutions be considered accessories to the alleged crime?

This is the case today for the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England and Pennsylvania State University in America. If the CRU is above suspicion, why did the U.S. Department of Energy suspend funds for it in July citing scientific doubts raised by the Climategate revelations last November?

Leaked emails between the principal players, CRU’s Phil Jones and Penn State’s Michael Mann, documented their dismay over the fact that the overall temperatures of the Earth were not increasing and colluded to suppress any expression of global warming skepticism in respected science journals.

Indeed, one of Mr. Jones emails admitted that he had “deleted loads of emails” to avoid being exposed lest someone bring a Freedom of Information Act request. In July a Wall Street Journal commentary by Patrick J. Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, noted that at the heart of the yet unresolved issues are “professional misconduct, data manipulation, and the jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data.”

New study by American solar experts identifies a sharp fall in sunspot activity since 2007 that fits the hallmarks of a soon arriving ice age.

Solar scientists, not to be confused with climate scientists, study the most important heat engine driving our planet’s temperatures-the sun.

Matthew Penn and William Livingston, solar astronomers with the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, have been following a marked decrease in sunspot activity recently. Reputable studies link a prolonged drop in sunspot activity to a cooling epoch or even a potential new ice age as more sunspots correlate with more global warming, while fewer sunspots are proven to match episodes of long-term cooling.

Since the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 the talk has been about global warming. But 22 years on the evidence has grown to raise fears of a catastrophic climate switch in the opposite direction. We look at the evidence that is raising some very serious questions in the scientific community.

Mr Kloppers of BHP says that the mainstream science is correct, and we need to stabilise (and eventually reduce) the carbon concentration in the atmosphere”.

This is an amazingly sloppy comment from the head of a company whose shareholders would expect it to rely on good science and accurate language to run its businesses.

Firstly, no power station these days puts “carbon” into the atmosphere. Carbon is a black sooty substance produced as a result of incomplete combustion of coal in open fires and dirty old fashioned boilers. In modern boilers, all carbon is completely burnt to produce invisible, non-polluting, life supporting carbon dioxide.

Secondly, to describe the shallow agenda-driven model manipulation and data-fitting from the IPCC that supports the case for de-carbonising Australia as “mainstream science” means his minders have not kept up with the science nor the debate.

By Ross McKitrick, Ph.D
Professor of Environmental Economics, University of Guelph, Canada

Introduction

News broke on or around 19 November 2009 that a large archive of emails and files from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK had been released on the internet. The contents of the files were sufficiently disconcerting to the public, governments and university administrations that a number of inquiries were established. Several of my research projects were discussed not only in the so-called “Climategate” emails themselves, but also in the investigations, and I made detailed submissions of evidence to three of the panels.

Consequently I take considerable interest in the outcome of these inquiries, especially with regards to whether they approached the issues impartially, investigated thoroughly and drew valid conclusions that fully reflected the evidence.

As of 30 August 2010 all five had issued their reports. The overall impression that has been created is that the scientists and their work were vindicated. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Chair Rajendra Pachauri declared in a recent interview1

“the doubts raised have proved to be unfounded.”

Considerable reliance is being placed upon the outcome of these investigations. As I will
show, for the most part the inquiries were flawed, but where they actually functioned as proper inquiries, they upheld many criticisms. But a surprising number of issues were sidestepped or handled inadequately. The world still awaits a proper inquiry into climategate: one that is not stacked with global warming advocates, and one that is prepared to cross-examine evidence, interview critics as well as supporters of the CRU and other IPCC players, and follow the evidence where it clearly leads.

A report on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on behalf of the world’s leading scientific academies, last week provoked even some of the more committed believers in man-made global warming to demand the resignation of Dr Rajendra Pachauri as chairman of the IPCC. But is the report all that it seems?

Last winter, the progress of this belief – that the world faces catastrophe unless we spend trillions of dollars to halt global warming – suffered an unprecedented reverse. In Copenhagen, the world’s leaders failed to agree a treaty designed to reshape the future of civilisation. This coincided with a series of scandals that blew up around the IPCC’s 2007 report.

Since then several inquiries, including three into the leaked “Climategate” emails, have tried to hold the official line, all following a consistent pattern. Each has made a few peripheral criticisms, for plausibility, while deliberately avoiding the main issue. Each has then gone on to put over the required message: that the science of global warming remains unchallenged